PROPOSAL NUMBER: CNS-0448246 PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Gupta, Indranil INSTITUTION: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign PROPOSAL TITLE: CAREER: Systematic Design of Distributed Protocols - from Methodologies and Toolkits to Systems
Distributed protocols such as resource discovery, cooperative caching, replication, etc., are crucial to the scalability and reliability of large-scale distributed systems such as the Web and the Grid. Today, however, the critical activity of designing a distributed protocol relies on an ad-hoc approach - literature, experience, and basic Computer Science knowledge provide the only assistance. This often leads to complex protocols, increased design times and costs, and eventually to inefficient use of research potential.
This project is exploring systematic techniques for designing distributed protocols, assisted by the use of Design Methodologies for distributed protocols. Design methodologies augment the creative process of protocol innovation, without stifling it. The project is creating new methodologies that systematically convert naturally observed phenomena into protocols with predictable properties. One innovative methodology translates differential equation systems into equivalent distributed protocols. Composable methodologies are also being developed, allowing protocol designers flexibility to enrich protocols with desired properties.
The methodologies invented and discovered in this project will be used to design new system designs for cooperative web caching, adaptive Grid computing, persistent distributed file systems, and disaster response and recovery. The methodologies will be made available to the community as Integrated design Toolkits (IdTs) that automate methodologies and enable a designer to automatically generate compilable code for a protocol. While methodologies have been used with varying degrees of success in other fields of science, this project is the one of the first to study its benefits and drawbacks in certain focus areas of distributed systems.
